He did not wait for an answer. He simply gathered up a few of our freshest exchanges and stole softly down the stairs.

We decline to make any comment one way or the other, because we do not know that the country is ripe for the discussion of this question, but it deserves cold, calm, candid thought on the part of all thinking men, to say the least.


THE TRUE POET LOVES SECLUSION.

The true poet loves seclusion and soothing rest. That is the secret of his even numbers and smooth cadences. Look at Dryden, and Walt Whitman, and Milton, and Burns, and the Sweet Singer of Michigan. What could any of them have done with the house full of children of the forest who were hankering for a fresh pail of gore for lunch?

A PIE OPENER

A handsome competence is in store for the man who will invent a neat, durable and portable pie opener that will successfully reach the true inwardness of the average, box-toed, Bessemer steel, gooseberry pie which the hired girl casts in her kitchen foundry.